Data for Source Citations for Records Found in the New Every Word Search at FamilySearch

I wrote about my cool find at the new FamilySearch feature of every word search in US land and probate records. This game-changer has allowed me to locate more records than I had found using just the land indexes and probate indexes. Sometimes the clerk might forget to record the transaction in the index, or if the index was copied into a new modern system, an entry might get missed. Ever wondered how an ancestor got a deed for the land they were selling? It might be missing from the index but is in the deed book.

My post yesterday on my other blog, showed how to locate these cool documents. Today, I want to show how to locate the information you need to create source citations. This document is found within the new “images” section, so the procedure I used in the past does not work. The digital film number is not listed above the images as it was before when accessing documents from the catalog entry.

Below is the results page for the Coor-Hoggatt agreement. Let’s work our way around the image. At the top left, we see these are Copiah County deeds. It does not give the state, but that is in the text. The range of deeds is for 1825-1832. I am looking at image 96 of 417.

At the bottom, we see the film strip showing the previous and next images. There are arrows on the right and left to use for scrolling. You can also change the view to all the thumb images (red arrow). Next to that is the download button (blue arrow) but I don’t download the image until I have collected more information about it, so I can include that in its name.

The record comes up with the full transcript window open and your search terms are highlighted in yellow. Be careful about saving the transcript as there are usually lots of errors. You can see in this example that the highlighted surnames are written twice. They are not this way in the actual document. 

You have a choice to copy this text and download the text. Downloading the text dialog box gives you several choices:

• Record image including highlights
• Record image with no highlights
• Don’t include record image
• Include the transcript.

It downloads as a pdf. This is unfortunate, as you cannot make any corrections in the text unless you have access to Adobe Acrobat or program that can edit pdfs. It's probably better to copy and paste into a word processing program so you can edit it.

There are other tabs adjacent to the Full Text tab: Index and Group Data. These two tabs will help with data for the source citation. Clicking on “Index” gives a place to make corrections to the index.

The last tab is Image Group Data. This is the metadata for the entire group of images. We see it is Copiah County deeds from 1825 to 1832. Two volumes are on this roll, volumes B and C. The creator, Copiah County, Mississippi Chancery Clerk is listed. Scrolling further down, I find the Image Group Number (the digital film number) 008201517. There is also a source citation that can be copied. However, this is not a complete source citation for the document you are planning to save. It is for the whole film. The creator and the custodian are hyperlinks that take you to the images page with all the links to what they hold. The image group number link takes you to the single link for that film.

Source Citation Data
What I need to capture before I download this document is the URL for the image, the volume number, the film number, and the image number. I also need the date of the transaction and the people involved. This is what I came up for the source citation:

Copiah County, Mississippi, deeds, vol. B, pp. 175-76, agreement, John Coor and Joel Hoggatt, 1826, imaged at FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-CSLL-B3D5-K : accessed 4 Mar 2024), IGN 008201517, image 96 of 417; citing Copiah County Chancery Clerk, Hazlehurst, Mississippi.

This is a layered citation starting with the document and then citing where I viewed it. This is the method I use for documents that are not in titled collections that are indexed, though this method could be used for that, too.

Now that I have collected the above data for the citation, I’ll download the images and name them in the style I use: 1826_Deed-CopiahCoMS-vB-175-Coor-HoggattAgreement.jpg.

I tried entering the transcription in the notes field in RootsMagic, but I had to do a lot of cleaning up. I would rather look at the document and extract what I need from it. The bonus is, I am reading the document and seeing any clues it gives me. I would not have that advantage if I just copied and pasted the transcription made by an AI bot. Even though this document was typed, there were still errors. Imagine the kinds of errors there would be for a handwritten document.

I hope seeing my work process will help you with your finds.

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